Kisses on a Postcard Read Free

was able to keep her two penniless sisters. The younger one was sweet, vague Auntie Clare, who played the violin and viola and had a lifelong affaire with an equally broke violinist. When he died he left her all his possessions, a cupboardful of violins, not one of them a Stradivarius. I enjoy using the period word ‘ affaire ’ for their love lives because that is the mot juste ; it was listening to their gossip that I first heard it, voice lowered, second syllable slightly stressed, and wondered what it meant. The older penniless sister was crabby Aunt Millicent, a virgin I am sure, who had taught algebra and Greek at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and intimidated Mum and her sister throughout their childhood. They all lived in a grand, spacious Edwardian house, 47 The Drive, the best address in Hove, with the sea at the end of the road. Again we could feel special. Molly and husband – who used to hand Jack and me munificent half-crowns when we visited – occupied the main, sumptuous body of the house, Clare and Milly in the basement flat. The general conclusion among Mum’s all-female relatives was that she had married beneath her. Nevertheless, they showed sympathy rather than censure.
    A cherished memory of Mum (of so many) is of her standing in the kitchen in Welling with Jack and me sitting at the table, the radio on, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov or Stravinsky or Ravel or Debussy or Tchaikovsky playing; she holding a cooking implement, waving her arms and hands about, a faraway smile on her face. She would undulate in her version of a harem-type dance, saying, ‘Listen, boys, listen. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? See? The Russians and the Romantics and the Moderns. Aren’t they lovely? Just listen.’ And I have, ever since.
     
    The day before the Second World War started (it was a Saturday) Dad shovelled Mum, Jack and me off to safety in Portslade, near Brighton, to stay with Mum’s sister and family in another 1930 s house similar to our own. Great-aunt Molly probably paid the deposit on that one too, treating the sisters equally. Safety? We would have been right in the path of any invading Germans. Auntie Esme (a former cellist who had sailed to South Africa and back, scraping away) was married to Uncle Walter; they were a very happy pair; their children were our cousins, David, Audrey and Maureen.
    I listened to the famous declaration-of-war broadcast by Neville Chamberlain at 11 a.m. on that first Sunday in September 1939 with Mum, Auntie Esme and Maureen. Something like panic reigned. Dad, Uncle Walter, Jack, David and tomboy Audrey had gone out for a walk on the foreshore (you could scarcely call the undistinguished bit of coastline at Portslade a beach). Would they be back before the Germans landed? Was our fear for them or for ourselves, left undefended at home? Maureen and I scuttered anxiously up and down the street looking for them, told to venture no further by Mum and Auntie Esme, who were peering out of the front door as all the church bells in the land tolled out their dreadful warnings. I saw the four of them some way off, strolling towards me in animated conversation, and ran anxiously up to them yelling, ‘Did you see any Germans?’ I was greeted with bafflement, then derision.
    During the autumn of the Phoney War we cousins privately started the real thing between ourselves. We brawled incessantly. Auntie Esme and Mum, who were very close and loved their reunion, tried to ignore us, while Uncle Walter, tall, gangling, gentle Uncle Walter, decided to bring us all together with a cooperative project. Under his leadership we all embarked on the doomed attempt to build an air-raid shelter in the back garden. This trench, dug with so much effort into the solid clay that was under the garden, was always half full of water and was a glorious place to fight with our cousins and produce quantities of mud that horrified even our hardened mothers. Uncle Walter lived above the squalls and skirmishing in a